The legacy of ancient email archiving technology

April 9, 2015

With the explosion of email data this century, lack of information, governance policies and complex IT infrastructures have caused enterprise-level organizations endless troubles. Between the years of 2002 and 2005, enterprise organizations decided to implement first generation email archiving solutions, which rapidly became a trend. Archiving began with email and even in 2015, email is still the primary form of data that needs to be archived. This has been driven by compliance issues and need to comply with a variety of legal regulations.

The problem is that it’s difficult to preserve data efficiently and securely without some form of archiving technology. Companies tend to look for ways to shrink the size of their archives, which were often implemented years ago to cope with email management, legal requirements and regulatory compliance. For organizations that implemented an archive back in 2002 and haven’t modernized it, this lead to archives that are bursting at the seams with dated communications.

Information governance has shifted since the early 2000s. Data now has a set expiration date depending on various industry regulations. This change in thinking enables companies to delete old archives with confidence and shrink their email archiving requirements.

This new way of thinking means a better kind of information governance and allows organizations to reduce legal risks when faced with massive data stores. Older email archiving solutions often don’t support data retention policies. Now, any archiving product worth its weight, like Exclaimer Mail Archiver, comes will time-based retention policies so an organizations can easily deal with the bloat associated with ancient email archives.